2. Jones’ signal contribution is nothing more or less than pointing out that as technology becomes more perfect, the ability of a State to control the behavior, and even the thoughts to some great extent, of their populace will expand. Given that there is no principled objection to the abuse of power among our power elite–given, indeed, that most of them are calling for a global government, and restrictive rules to stop whatever they say they are worried about this month–that this regime will slowly and imperceptibly take power over all of us is more or less like saying water will flow downhill. It is logically obvious. It is inevitable, unless we object strongly, clearly, and across a wide enough swathe of the population.
Perhaps we could even extrapolate from Moore’s Law that every eighteen months the potential power of a technocratic totalitarian regime will double also.
3. I read that Venezuela is rolling out a Chinese style social credit system, which in effect rewards the most compliant with things. We will see how it works there, given that there is nothing to distribute, but in China the fascinating thing about this is that they have in effect elevated bourgeois values to the level of State Religion. They are not asking that people comply with Communism, but rather are promising to give the True Believers, or at least the most conformist, more stuff than everyone else.
It is a full circle. It is astonishing. The “Communists” have created an oligarchic regime which is authoritarian, anti-democratic, highly elitist, oriented in the main around personal financial gain, and which publicly espouses all the values which the Communist intellectuals of the 20th century despised.
They have recreated old school Chinese despotism which has been there off and on for well over 2,000 years, and done their best to turn its people into stereotypical Americans. This, at a cost of 50 million or more lives, after the destruction of the lives and minds of billions.
This is the world we live in.
Ideas, and the intelligence behind them, matter. They matter a great deal. In the long run, very little else matters.